I suspect you might be very unpleasantly surprised by how little things would change. Additionally, they were quite honest about what they did:

> 1-68 CAB’s solution was to drop the building using the GMLRS.

It is, of course, quite possible that "drop the building" is insufficiently honest for you. I'm sure the author could have written "explosively annihilated the five-story building under construction, most likely killing any person inside or atop it". Though I confess I'm not sure what this phrasing would add that "drop the building" does not. Perhaps you can enlighten me?

In this case, the intended audience appears to be mainly subject matter experts. So they use the jargon of concrete-penetrating because that appears to be the relevant technical detail that guided the munitions choice.

There isn't [much of] an explosion with rockets. They are [mostly] kinetic energy weapons. A GMLRS is fired way up in the sky with a HIMARS launcher system, and then down to the ground - usually through a roof of a building. It will fragment upon hitting the ground floor, hopefully taking out a couple of the internal load-bearing walls.

It [primarily] creates an implosion, not an explosion, which is why it's such a good weapon system for reducing collateral damage in an urban warfare setting. You can level a building and barely scratch the exterior walls of the building right next to it.

EDIT: Modified the portions in square brackets. I stand corrected - there is a small explosive charge on the ends of the rockets.

We really are inventive killer apes throwing ever faster rocks at each other.

That's very interesting! Thank you for the detail.

>It is, of course, quite possible that "drop the building" is insufficiently honest for you. I'm sure the author could have written "explosively annihilated the five-story building under construction, most likely killing any person inside or atop it". Though I confess I'm not sure what this phrasing would add that "drop the building" does not. Perhaps you can enlighten me?

That's just ridiculous. Silly and snarky. But you know that. The GP wanted honest, not more verbose; plain language that describes the reality, not pseudo-objective jargon that conceals it. What makes it horrific is that you're joking about killing lots of people.

"Drop the building" is also a euphemism, like "light up" to mean to kill. Making murder sound bland and neutral. But I suppose it must be, to the "subject matter experts".

"Drop the building" is not a euphemism here. It does nothing at all to disguise the effect of the action or pretend it's anything less than immensely destructive to both property and life. It describes an action taken deliberately, with intent, to destroy and kill.

My point being that the article is neither euphemistic nor dishonest. It is quite straightforward and clear about actions, goals, means, and expected outcomes. I understand if some people might disagree and consider the wording used to be insufficiently evocative for their own personalized interpretations of more broadly recognized vernacular.

To be clear, I am in no way, shape, or form joking about killing people. I am pointing out that the article treats the matter with gravitas.

I would argue that being able to destroy a single building with an air strike is a HUGE reduction in 'killing lots of people' compared to wars past, where large bombers dropped thousands of bombs over entire areas of a city hoping to weaken/destroy infrastructure the enemy was using.

> dropped thousands of bombs over entire areas of a city hoping to weaken/destroy infrastructure

I'm pretty sure that in a lot of cases, hitting urban area was the goal, with theories that killing civilians will help win the war.

Pedantic nitpick: “drop the building” isn’t a euphemism. It literally reflects the intended action that will lead to the desired result (if the insurgent dies great, if not the threat is eliminated anyway).

To say "drop the building" when it means "destroy the building (and everyone inside)" has that same horrifying whitewashing feel that "light up" has for me. The bland language allows people to do things they otherwise (hopefully) couldn't/wouldn't.

"Drop" is a term of art from the demolition industry. The U.S. Army does a lot of non-combat demolition work, the Corps of Engineers in particular, and the language carries over quite naturally.

In this case, "destroy the building" is less accurate than "drop". Their goal was complete demolition, to prevent the building from being occupied by more fighters. The intended audience of this article will understand the language clearly.

The article describes the problem as a building that extends above the surrounding 3-story neighborhood. (5 if I remember right) That is the problem to be solved, so carving off the top couple stories would do the job.

There are less-practical solutions. One could pull out the 2nd and 4th stories, like playing a game of Jenga. One could shove the whole building down by two stories, fully intact, giving it two basements.

So "drop" seems especially fitting here. The highest point needs to drop by two stories.

It's domain specific language. Its meaning is absolutely clear to those involved.

This is technical writing in the same way that "the function returns a pointer to an array containing the last n bytes from the network buffer" is the technical version of "it gets data from the internet".

Once you start seeing militarese for the technical writing that it is, a lot starts to make sense. In this case, they're listing the constraints of a problem, and describing the solution that was selected. Believe it or not, the choice of ordinance in this case is called a "firing solution".

My point is this: they are writing honestly. In fact, it quite common to refer to "kills" on the radio, and in after-action reports. Where the "its dead" level of analysis suffices, the military will say "it dead".

Consider instead how many soldiers might perish if the focus shifted away from "firing solutions" and towards accurate descriptions of agony.

The former is the job of the military. The latter is the job of the journalist. Both have important roles to play, here.

"firing solution" is a set of numbers that describes how you get the ordnance there. It's a gunnery term.

btw, since we're being pedantic about terminology, it's "ordnance", not "ordinance" -- the latter means laws.

Points taken. I should clarify that my experience is with French infantry, which I suspect accounts for the slight difference in vocabulary.

Re "firing solution", I've heard it used both in artillery (i.e.: "solution to a parabolic equation") and in a more general context of "tactical solutions". The latter might be an informal term, in US parlance, though.

Could very well be. My perspective is US Naval and ground warfare gunnery.

> I truly wonder how many innocent lives could be saved if military people would start writing honestly.

People didn't die because of writing. They died because someone used the building to shoot at people and couldn't be flushed out with smaller weapons. So, the answer to your question is "probably zero"

The argument is that using euphemisms must serve some purpose, or otherwise they would not be used.

That purpose is to hide the brutality of war, from either the writer, or the reader.

In either case, allowing to hide the brutality makes it arguably more palatable to commit it (writer) or legitimize it (reader), and therefore contributes to it.

I can’t put numbers on this, obviously, because nobody can. But just denying the argument with a sort of its-not-guns-that-kill-it’s-people-argument is intellectually dishonest.

I think you, or the original comment author, are mistaking technical language for euphemisms though and so the psychological analysis that euphemisms are hiding the brutality of war is not even wrong because there is no euphemism. As another comment points out "concrete penetrating" is a description that tells the class of weapon and the reason the weapon was chosen (to attack a target protected by concrete). The author isn't euphemisming but rather just using language appropriate to the context and the intended audience.

If it’s just language, what does “drop the building” actually mean? Last I checked, you can only drop stuff you can actually pick up. You can, however, drop things onto buildings, some of which may collapse them.

If you insist that “dropping” is for some reason preferable to “demolish” or “collapse”, say because it’s shorter or the military has trouble spelling those actual terms, I am sure you can find me a reference in non-lethal industries involved in the destruction of construction using the term. My superficial research seems to indicate that those wielding wrecking balls instead of laser-guided missiles see no need to obfuscate their doings.

"Drop" is a widely used colloquialism in demolition, to the point that it's practically a term of art. It's ubiquitous both in civilian demolition work and in the Army Corps of Engineers. In demolition work you'll hear it at least as often as "demolish". Nothing wrong with "collapse"; it just isn't used much. I've never heard anyone use "destroy" when talking about demolition.

I just searched google both for [drop building] and [drop demolish]. Neither search yielded examples for the use of “drop” in such a way. I was similarly out of luck with the Oxford American dictionary, Googl New, and Scholar. Ca to link an example?

From http://www.controlled-demolition.com/biltmore-hotel:

> precisely placed explosive charges dropped a 28-story building almost in its tracks.

> "It's the heaviest steel we’ve ever worked on," says Mark Loizeaux, of Controlled Demolition, Inc. (CDI), Towson, Md., which dropped the brick-clad structure for contractor Wells Excavating Co., Inc., Oklahoma City.

> CDI’s detonation sequence aimed to drop the building in a southerly direction in what is called a controlled progressive collapse in order to lay out the demolished structure to ease removal of debris.

> In 1975 CDI demolished a 32-story reinforced concrete building in Sao Paulo, Brazil, the only building taller than the Biltmore to be dropped with explosives

From http://www.controlled-demolition.com/travelers-building:

> Controlled Demolition Incorporated’s team was able to complete asbestos abatement/environmental remediation, prepare the structure for implosion and drop the massive structural steel building just 2 weeks

> Controlled Demolition Incorporated's DREXS (Directional Remote Explosive Severance) System sequentially severed the 4 inch thick flanges of the buildings' support columns to drop the structure without damage to a Boston Fire Department facility just 30 feet away.

The query demolition "drop a building" yields a plethora of results.

Can you pick up a database?

Edit: to be clear, I’m against the pedantry at play here. Subject matter experts talk in their specific jargon. We do it in tech, why would the military be any different?

First, a minor point, but it's not true that "drop" refers only to things you might pick up. You could drop an egg which would break, you could drop something down a bottomless pit, you could drop a facade, etc. It's also not the case that you couldn't "pick up" a "dropped" building, either by cleaning the rubble or rebuilding it.

Second, "drop" may be colloquial but I don't see how it's disguising the action and the consequences. It seems to me there are similar objections to "demolish" - it's like a construction project, or "collapse" it's an unintentional tragedy. If I had to argue for "drop" I suspect it's advantage is that it describes how you want the building and the rubble to fall - down instead of out.

I'd be willing to consider the merits of different word choices, but what I think we should be hesitant about is drawing deep psychological conclusions from word choices that may be entirely coincidental or have a different motive than you think. E.g. "The author uses terms like 'drop' to disguise the horror of war and if such language weren't used we'd have less war." That feels like an overreach to me.

I was referring to picking stuff up before dropping them.

Not that the specific example is that relevant, as others have notice. I think it’s hard to deny that the military uses euphemisms: “soft targets”, “neutralize”, and “collateral damage” come to mind.

From there, it’s a small step to wonder what the intend may be. And even independent of intent (I could see an argument for using euphemisms with good intentions, or just to avoid very human emotions, much like medicine does), if that choice may still have the consequence of making difficult choices easier than they should be.

In any case, I was mostly just arguing that the idea that “language is meaningless, bombs kill people” is somewhere between ignorant and naive.

It's pretty hard to argue with that last sentence, but I think your armchair analysis of language used outside of your realm of experience is leading to you to take unecessary offense.

"Soft targets" include people, yes, but the term generally refers to any unhardended, unarmored, or unprotected thing.

"Neutralize" encompasses any kind of condition that removes a soldier from the battlefield, including death, injury, debilitating trauma, etc.

"Collateral damage" is similarly broad. It's any shit you didn't mean to fuck up.

No doubt these terms are used euphemistically at times. But I also can't, off the top of my head, think of any others that could directly replace them accurately and concisely, while also satisfying the demands of folks who lack the experience (or the desire perhaps) to understand their utility in context.

This is, honestly, quite ridiculous in context. It might be true that, say, someone launching an ICBM might be shielded from the horror of the violence with clinical terms. When you are in urban ground combat it's not as if you say "hmm, it makes it feel better if I think of it as only shooting the building!" You are perfectly fine with killing because YOU'RE BEING SHOT AT and you're afraid you're going to die. The correct criticism, if you're looking for one, is that Soldiers and Marines learn to put on a facade of ultraviolent aggression so as to not confront the reality, and as a result they lose perspective and maybe go too far in some cases, and that's what you need to watch for (I was a platoon leader in Iraq)

This is simply how military tactics and strategy are talked about in an academic sense. It might be weird to think that Military Science is an academic discipline when you're not used to talking about war all the time, but when you're at West Point you take these classes and this is the tone. It's because you're not going to stop every 5 minutes to reflect on those who died in combat -- that would be kind of crazy, and there are plenty of other contexts where the moral and ethical issues of war and combat are discussed in great depth.

To make an analogy, your comment would be like my reading a Computer Science paper about something technical and then commenting: "why is this person writing about technology in such technical terms? Is it because they don't want to confront the negative consequences of technology on our political and social fabric? Don't they care about the privacy issues?" It's kind of just a way to say that you wish they were talking about what YOU want to talk about.

It's not a euphemism. It's an accurate description of what matters. I would have chosen "collapse the building" or "level the building", despite being undisturbed by the death. The writer isn't about to distract from the topic at hand by going off on an opinionated tangent about death.

Wow, I wish you had written my comment. Well put!

It’s an unfortunate symptom of our times that we need to spell out every argument in minute detail, lest someone will do a bad-faith hack job willfully misunderstanding it.

They died because the military chose to level an entire building to kill a single person.

No, they demolished the building to prevent it from being re-occupied by more fighters. Remember, U.S. forces were prohibited from entering Sadr City, so they really had no other way to do so.

>I truly wonder how many innocent lives could be saved if military people would start writing honestly.

How much would you reckon?

In MBA lingo, reducing cost often means laying off people, ruining their lives. Or paying as little as possible to employees, keeping them in perpetual servitude.

[redacted]

Rockets can and do “blow up” they’re just the part of a missile which carries the reaction mass. Most missiles in the military sense have a rocket component, except for cruise missiles with turbofan engines. In short, rockets tend to have explosive payloads. “Rocket” just refers to the type of engine, and makes no claims about the nature of the warhead.

[redacted]

I think we’re talking at cross purposes here. You’re talking about the meaning as it relates to a given set of weapons systems, I’m talking about what the word “rocket” actually means. As in the R in RPG, which is notable for its explosive warhead, or any number of other rocket propelled explosive devices. More generally I’m also talking about rocket engines, the presence of which indicates a rocket. As I said, there are a variety of rockets in and out of the military, some with explosive payloads, some with nothing more than an aluminum powder payload.

[redacted]

Yes, and it’s not exactly modular is it, nor is there a version sans grenade. Still, I’ll play this if you prefer.

http://characterisationexplosiveweapons.org/studies/annex-a-...

9M22 ROCKET. The 9M22 is a fin-stabilised rocket with a steel high explosive fragmentation (HE-FRAG) warhead. The 9N51 warhead contains 6.4 kg of TGAF-5 explosive composition, and generates some 3,920 pre-fragmented fragments.

I would add rhe AS-11 and 12 as two more rockets with explosive warheads.

https://www.gd-ots.com/missiles-and-rockets/hydra-70-rocket-...

General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems is the system integrator of the 2.75-inch (70mm) Hydra-70 family of rockets. These rockets include unitary and cargo warheads for use against point and area targets, providing the user a lethal and lightweight weapon system with multi-mission capability. The rocket system contains three components: the MK66 MOD 4 rocket motor, one of the nine warheads, and the associated point-detonating, omni-directional, remote-set fuze(s). When these components are combined, they provide a tailor-made solution to the warfighter’s situational requirements.

I would add the now defunct Mk.4 FFAR to the list, along with others.

[redacted]

Redacting your comments makes it look like you're trying to hide your mistakes. If you no longer stand behind the content of a comment, it's probably better to just put an edit at the top.

Fair enough. This subthread was a semantic argument about whether the term "rocket" pertained also to any incendiary munitions to which they were attached. I maintained (and still maintain) that a "rocket" - especially a guided one - is not inherently explosive.

However, this semantic argument was in the context of a discussion about GMLRS, which - after checking - do in fact have a small explosive charge attached.

Anyway. End result is that my substantive comment about GMLRS does contain the correction. And this semantic argument seems all the more pointless now. Hence my removal of my comments.